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How much weight does the iTunes music store have to throw around?  A ton according to new data released from market tracking firm NPD.

Measuring unit sale in the first half of 2009, NPD MusicWatch reports Apple’s music store now accounts for a quarter of U.S. music sales. That’s not a quarter of digital sales, it’s 25 percent of everything.

During the first half of 2009, while CD sales continued to erode, digital music sales grew to 35% of the market, up from 20 percent in 2007 and 30 percent in 2008.  According to Russ Crupnick , NPD’s vice president of entertainment industry analysis, “with digital music sales growing at 15 to 20 percent, and CDs falling by an equal proportion, digital music sales will nearly equal CD sales by the end of 2010."

iTunes’ lead in the digital market is massive. Apple owned 69 percent of the digital music market in the first half of 2009.  Amazon, in a very distant second, held 8 percent.

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With internet traffic and usage, there are any of number of firms that track behavior. ComScore, Nielsen, Quantcast, and Pew, to name a handful.  Each tries to provide insight into what’s popular, what’s growing – where the trends are.  Each can be valuable but each can have its limitations too.

From one to the next, results can often differ in the detail.  And even within the results of a single firm’s measurements, a pattern appearing in a short period of time often disappears across a broader swath.  

Such is the nature of statistics.  As an old saying aptly puts it: facts are stubborn but statistics pliable.  Slice em up or sort ‘em the right way and you can tell a lot of different stories.

That said, disclaimers thrown front and center, comScore released its search engine marketshare measurements for July on Monday.  (release)

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